Tools I Use - Speech Note
"It usually takes more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech." - Mark Twain
In the past five or so years, technology has evolved such that it’s quite easy to find tools that can read text and generate reasonably good speech. With the arrival of generally available AI tools, computerized capabilities in this area have evolved exponentially. My browser can read web articles to me in tolerable voices when my eyes are tired of looking at the screen. But I’ve found an even better use for computerized text to speech: Reading my writing back to me.
I can’t afford an editor - or at least a good one - for my writing, as much as I wish I could. To have someone capable and motivated to wrestle with my ideas and bring the hard truths back to me would be wonderful. Maybe some day. Until then, I have to muddle through on my own.
However, using AI, having my writing read back to me in a variety of voices serves as a reasonably good second-best editor. The quick win is that I hear my typos and grammar issues. These pop right out even if I’ve re-read my article a dozen times. Even better, I find that I hear different interpretations of my ideas when I change the voice. A perky female twenty-something Australian reveals elements of my ideas that are different when the same text is read by a stodgy professorial male American English voice. Choose a non-English voice - for example, Hindu or German or Japanese - and things become down right hilarious and muddled. It’s clear who my audience is.
The tool I’ve been using for the better part of a year to accomplish this is called Speech Note. Not only does Speech Note read text in whatever voice I choose, it will take dictation that is phenomenally accurate. I don’t use this feature as much because I find it much easier to move my ideas into the computer with the keyboard rather than me just blathering on and than having to edit the text later. So I’m still experimenting with this feature. The third thing Speech Note can do is translate text. I’ve played with this feature even less than the speech to text feature.
So for the time being, Speech Note is my editor.Official description:
“Speech Note let [sic] you take, read and translate notes in multiple languages. It uses Speech to Text, Text to Speech and Machine Translation to do so. Text and voice processing take place entirely offline, locally on your computer, without using a network connection. Your privacy is always respected. No data is sent to the Internet.”
“Tools I Use - Speech Note” last updated on 2025.10.12.
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